Building Hawaii Insurability Brief: A Free Property Hazard Lookup for Hawaii Homeowners
A builder's account of why we built a free 10-field hazard lookup for Hawaii properties — lava zone, FEMA flood, tsunami, coastline distance, hurricane wind, wildfire risk, BFE, shoreline management area, roof age, and carrier availability — and how the freemium model works.
There is a specific kind of phone call that happens a lot in Hawaii real estate. A buyer goes under contract on a property in Puna or Waipio or along the Maui coast. Their lender or agent mentions “lava zone” or “flood zone” and, suddenly, the buyer — or their insurance broker — is scrambling to understand whether the property is insurable at all, what it will cost, and what the state has to say about building there. The call is almost always urgent and often happens after the inspection period closes.
We built Hawaii Insurability Brief to answer that call before it becomes urgent.
What the product actually does
Hawaii Insurability Brief is a property lookup tool. You paste in an address (or a TMK — the Hawaii tax map key number), and the tool returns a structured brief on ten hazard and insurability fields for that parcel. Here is what the brief covers:
1. Lava zone. The USGS classifies all land on the Big Island into nine lava flow hazard zones (LHZ 1 being highest risk, LHZ 9 lowest). Zone 1 and 2 properties are uninsurable through the standard voluntary market — period. If you buy LHZ 1 land without knowing it, you own uninsurable land. The brief returns the LHZ for the parcel and a plain-English interpretation.
2. FEMA flood zone designation. Hawaii has several thousand parcels in Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs) across all islands. Zone A and Zone AE properties require flood insurance if there is a federally backed mortgage. Zone V properties — coastal areas subject to wave action — are in a different risk class altogether. The brief returns the FEMA FIRM panel designation, not just “in a flood zone” or “not.”
3. Tsunami evacuation zone. Hawaii has six tsunami evacuation zones, lettered A through F, set by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. Zone A is highest risk. Knowing the zone does not directly predict insurability, but it matters for carrier underwriting, for government-backed secondary market eligibility, and for the basic due diligence of buying land in an ocean state.
4. Coastline distance. Raw meters from the parcel centroid to the nearest shoreline. This number shows up in carrier underwriting tables more often than most buyers expect. Many admitted carriers in Hawaii stop writing windstorm coverage within 1,000 feet of the ocean; some stop at 2,500 feet. The number matters.
5. Hurricane wind exposure. Based on parcel geography, island, and elevation. Hawaii is in the Central Pacific hurricane zone. The island chain sits outside the main Atlantic hurricane belt but has absorbed direct hits and near misses — Iniki (1992), Lane (2018), and a list of close calls that make the risk non-theoretical. Wind exposure classification affects the availability and premium of both homeowners and dwelling fire policies.
6. Wildfire risk. Derived from state and federal fire hazard data. The Maui wildfires of August 2023 moved this field from a background concern to the front of every underwriting conversation in Hawaii. Several carriers have restricted or non-renewed Maui County policies since the fires. The brief returns the wildfire risk classification for the parcel.
7. Base Flood Elevation (BFE). For parcels in mapped flood zones, BFE is the FEMA-published elevation (in feet NAVD 88) at which the structure must be elevated to qualify for NFIP coverage. BFE and the actual structure elevation together determine the flood insurance premium — a gap of two feet below BFE can mean a $4,000-per-year premium difference.
8. Shoreline Management Area (SMA) classification. Hawaii’s Coastal Zone Management Act and the SMA permit system govern what can be built, expanded, or rebuilt within the coastal zone. An SMA designation affects not just permitting but the carrier’s perception of rebuild exposure after a storm loss. Some carriers treat SMA properties as construction-restricted, which affects replacement cost underwriting.
9. Roof age estimate. One of the first things a carrier’s underwriter asks about when binding homeowners coverage in Hawaii is the roof: age, material, and condition. A roof over 20 years old is often uninsurable through standard carriers. We pull permit history and satellite-derived roof data to surface the most recent roof permit and a condition estimate. It is an estimate — a physical inspection remains the authoritative source — but for preliminary due diligence it is the right number to have.
10. Carrier availability summary. Which admitted and surplus lines carriers are known to be actively writing in this parcel’s county, lava zone, flood zone, and wind exposure class? This is the most operationally useful field in the brief. It does not replace a quote, but it tells you immediately whether you are looking at a standard-market property, a surplus-lines-only property, or a property where you may be calling five brokers before you find anyone willing to write it at all.
Who this is for
We built it for four groups:
Hawaii homeowners who want to understand what they are buying before they close — or what they already own before their renewal notice arrives.
Real estate buyers — particularly from the mainland — who are encountering Hawaii-specific hazard classifications for the first time and do not have intuitions about what LHZ 2 or Zone AE means in practical terms.
Insurance brokers who spend non-trivial time every week pulling hazard data from FEMA, USGS, and county GIS sources before they can even quote a Hawaii property. A full brief in 30 seconds versus an afternoon of tab-switching is a real productivity gain.
Architects and planners doing preliminary site analysis. Before you invest in a full Phase 1 or engage a structural engineer, knowing the SMA status, BFE, and lava zone of the parcel is useful framing for the conversation.
The freemium model
Three fields — lava zone, FEMA flood zone, and tsunami evacuation zone — are free for any property, no account required. Those three fields answer the binary insurability question for most Hawaii properties: is this land in a zone that will make insurance difficult or impossible?
The full 10-field brief is $19 per property. That is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. For a buyer doing due diligence on a $750,000 property, $19 is a rounding error on their earnest money. For an investor running pre-screening on 15 properties before choosing which ones to make offers on, it is $285 for information that would otherwise take an afternoon to compile.
Brokers who are running five to fifty Hawaii property quotes a week can subscribe at $199 per month for unlimited briefs across all queries. The subscription also unlocks a simple API endpoint — structured JSON output from the same data pipeline — for brokers who want to pull brief data into their own quoting workflows.
Why we built it
The studio works across Hawaii real estate, construction, and permitting. We kept running into the same problem: hazard data for Hawaii properties exists (USGS publishes lava zone maps; FEMA publishes FIRM panels; the state publishes tsunami zone shapefiles), but it lives in five different places, most of which require GIS literacy to use. Nobody had pulled the data together into a single, address-queryable tool that gave a plain-English answer.
We also noticed that the 2023 Maui fires had accelerated a tightening of the Hawaii homeowners insurance market that was already happening — carriers have been non-renewing and restricting Hawaii policies for several years. The gap between “I have an address” and “I know whether this property is insurable and at roughly what cost” was getting wider, not narrower. A tool that closes that gap is useful regardless of the market cycle; in a tightening market it becomes essential.
What this is not
This is a preliminary hazard and insurability lookup. It is not a licensed insurance assessment, not an appraisal, and not legal advice about permit or SMA compliance. The carrier availability field is a market intelligence snapshot, not a quote. The roof age estimate is derived data, not a physical inspection. We say this clearly in the product and we mean it.
The value is in speed and synthesis — getting the right data in front of the right person ten minutes before the conversation rather than two days after.
The tool is live at insurability.ikenagroup.com. The free preview requires no account. If you are a broker who runs Hawaii property lookups regularly and wants to talk about the API or the subscription, the contact is on the site.
Ikena Design & Build is a software studio in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. We build AI-native tools for Hawaii real estate, construction, and permitting. See the portfolio.
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